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Originally Posted by opendoor
My 85 year old grandpa was mad when they took his license away after he had a stroke, but that doesn't mean it wasn't the right move.
Biden is clearly not fit to run a campaign or to be President for 4.5 more years. The mistake Democrats made was thinking they could hide this from voters, which meant they started putting pressure on him to not run again 1-2 years too late. They could have made a much smoother transition if Biden stuck to his "transitional candidate" thing that he was telling everyone before the 2020 election.
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First of all, I don't think it's clear that he couldn't do the job for another term. It is, however, clear that he could not win this election. His oratorical abilities have rapidly declined, to the point where it was catastrophically harming his campaign. Whether the accusations of him having dementia are true or not, is a separate question.
Bernie Sanders is about to turn 83. I don't think there's much (any?) doubt that he could handle a presidential term if he were elected this November. So this is not strictly an age thing. This is an optics and perception problem. One that Biden was trapped in and had no way of getting out of. Hence his only options were to pass the torch, or send his party careening toward inevitable defeat this November.
So no, I don't buy into this notion that there was some kind of shadowy conspiracy to hide Biden's mental state. The thinking probably was that incumbency, along with his legislative accomplishments, and Trump being a flawed candidate, would be enough to get Biden a 2nd term comfortably. They probably figured that the path of least resistance was to not rock the boat, go along to get along, and as long as Biden didn't do terribly at the debates, he would cruise to re-election. This was probably the thinking up until the debate disaster, but by then he already had the delegates and only he could make the decision to step aside.